Fireworks, a startup company, has raised $1.505 billion in a new funding round, raising its market value to $17.5 billion, after becoming one of the most prominent companies helping institutions run AI models faster and without building their own data centers.

More than 4 times jump in less than a year

According to an official announcement from Fireworks, the round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from NVIDIA Lightspeed, Bessemer Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and other investors. The round comes less than a year after the company received previous funding at an evaluation of $4 billion.
Fireworks offers a platform to run open and proprietary models within corporate applications, targeting reducing the time and cost required to process user requests, especially in programming services, search, and digital assistants. The company said its annual recurring revenue has reached $1 billion.

Money goes to servers and engineers

The company plans to use the funding to expand its computing capacity globally, hire more engineers, and develop tools that allow companies to customize and manage models within their own environments instead of relying entirely on a single closed provider.
Fireworks was founded by former Meta engineers who participated in developing AI model deployment technologies, and it has benefited from the growing demand for inference services, which are processes where the model uses its trained data to produce answers or images or code. The new funding puts the company among the most valuable artificial intelligence infrastructure companies.